Cloud computing to create 2 million jobs in India by 2015, says study

HYDERABAD: Cloud computing will generate some 14 million new jobs worldwide by 2015, and India alone will create over 2 million, predicts a study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC).

Pointing out to a strong linkage between cloud, innovation and entrepreneurship, the study said most companies look at migration to cloud computing as a way to free up existing resources and work on more innovative projects. Freeing up budget allows organisations to shift some of their legacy work to the cloud and invest such freed budget in IT innovation that supports business innovation and in turn create new jobs.

"A common misconception is cloud computing is a job eliminator, but in truth it will be a job creator - a major one," said John F Gantz, chief research officer and senior vice-president at IDC in a statement.

The Microsoft-IDC study estimates that the revenues from cloud innovation could reach as high as $1.1 trillion a year by 2015 from $400 billion in 2011, where some $28 billion was spent worldwide on public cloud IT services (as compared to over $1.7 trillion of spending on total IT products and services industry) creating 1.5 million jobs.

The study predicts over two million jobs each to be generated in the communications and media and manufacturing sectors, followed by banking at over 1.4 million. Though there is no such break-up available for the Indian market, the footprint is expected to be more or less similar to global markets, said Ramkumar Pichai, general manager, customer and partner experience, Microsoft India.

On the security, privacy and regulatory-related concerns that prevented rapid cloud adoption, he said Microsoft offered the best in class data centre security and also flexibility to organisations to shift between private cloud, public cloud and on premises software, apart from enabling organisations inter-operate between the three.

"We at Microsoft expect cloud computing to emerge as the most disruptive force for technology industry and enable India to emerge as the global innovation hub from global services hub now, apart from helping the Indian economy grow multi-fold," he told ET.

According to the Microsoft-IDC regional forecast, the US accounted for 62% of worldwide spending for public IT cloud services last year compared to 35% of worldwide IT spending. Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), a complex mix of developed and emerging countries, has more cloud-created jobs than North America, primarily because of its workforce, which is nearly four times as large.

Coming to Asia Pacific region, the study observed that except for a few small countries that account for only about 5% of the total workforce, the region is dominated by two countries in terms of job creation - China and India.